Theatricality. Edited by Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003; pp. 236. $55 cloth; $23.99 paper.

2005 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-127
Author(s):  
Janelle Reinelt
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
The Other ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Hierarchical Relationship ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
History Of Use

The concepts of theatricality and performativity have been enormously productive sources of recent scholarship in the fields of theatre and performance studies. While the former term has a long history of use and abuse, the latter has gained contemporary currency in connection with the emergence of performance studies, on the one hand, and new interpretations and applications of J. L. Austin's 1950s philosophy, on the other. As scholars have reexamined theatricality and probed performativity, a number of new uses of these terms have developed, and depending on the scholar's viewpoint, a binary or sometimes hierarchical relationship between these terms has prevailed.

The Rabbinic God and Mediaeval Judaism

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-390
Author(s):  
Dov Weiss
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Jewish Mysticism ◽  
Rabbinic Judaism ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
Essential Unity ◽  
Jewish Philosophy ◽  
The One ◽  
Modern Judaism

From the earliest stages of Wissenschaft des Judentums, scholars of Judaism typically read statements about God in the classical sources of Judaism with a mediaeval philosophical lens. By doing so, they sought to demonstrate the essential unity and continuity between rabbinic Judaism, later mediaeval Jewish philosophy and modern Judaism. In the late 1980s, the Maimonidean hold on rabbinic scholarship began to crack when the ‘revisionist school’ sought to drive a wedge between rabbinic Judaism, on the one hand, and Maimonidean Judaism, on the other hand, by highlighting the deep continuities and links between rabbinic Judaism and mediaeval Jewish mysticism (Kabbalah). The revisionist scholars regarded rabbinic Judaism as a pre-cursor to mediaeval Kabbalah rather than mediaeval Jewish philosophy. This article provides the history of scholarship on these two methods of reading rabbinic texts and then proposes that scholars adopt a third method. That is, building on the work of recent scholarship, we should confront theological rabbinic texts on their own terms, without the guiding hand of either mediaeval Jewish framework.

scholarly journals Disco Culture and the Ritual Journey in the Soviet 1980s

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin C. Karnes
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Performance Art ◽  
The Other ◽  
John Cage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Student Club ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Academic Year

This article traces a largely forgotten history of the 1980s Soviet disco craze by following the work of one of its pioneering figures, the Latvian DJ, musician, and performance artist Hardijs Lediņš (1955–2004). It documents how the movement coalesced amidst creative responses to the gradual opening of the USSR to Western popular culture on the one hand, and to the unique affordances of local political, social, and technological structures on the other. In Lediņš’s case, the response was also shaped by commitments to an ideal of Soviet socialism that persisted despite the grim realities of Brezhnev-era society. Drawing on archival research and oral history, I begin in the loosely monitored space of the Student Club at the Riga Polytechnic Institute, where Lediņš’s talents and ties to elites enabled him to found a wildly popular discotheque in the 1974–75 academic year, one of the first of its kind in the USSR. I follow his increasing investment in a distinctly Soviet form of experimentalist performance art in the early 1980s, in which—inspired in part by local readings of John Cage—the ritualized trek into the countryside became a vehicle for attaining spiritual enlightenment in communion with others. Finally, I consider ways in which his ritual journeys inflected his disco operation in subsequent years, when he reframed his events as experiments in communality—specifically, as means of experiencing, at least for an evening, the enlightening promise of Soviet socialism undelivered by the state itself.

The Great Dionysia and civic ideology

1987 ◽  
Vol 107 ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Goldhill
Keyword(s):  
Fifth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

There have been numerous attempts to understand the role and importance of the Great Dionysia in Athens, and it is a festival that has been made crucial to varied and important characterizations of Greek culture as well as the history of drama or literature. Recent scholarship, however, has greatly extended our understanding of the formation of fifth-century Athenian ideology—in the sense of the structure of attitudes and norms of behaviour—and this developing interest in what might be called a ‘civic discourse’ requires a reconsideration of the Great Dionysia as a city festival. For while there have been several fascinating readings of particular plays with regard to thepolisand its ideology, there is still a considerable need to place the festival itself in terms of the ideology of thepolis. Indeed, recent critics in a justifiable reaction away from writers such as Gilbert Murray have tended rather to emphasize on the one hand that the festival is a place of entertainment rather than religious ritual, and on the other hand that the plays should be approached primarily asdramaticperformances.

Theodor W. Adorno

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colby Dickinson
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
History Of Thought ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One

In his somewhat controversial book Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben makes brief reference to Theodor Adorno’s apparently contradictory remarks on perceptions of death post-Auschwitz, positions that Adorno had taken concerning Nazi genocidal actions that had seemed also to reflect something horribly errant in the history of thought itself. There was within such murderous acts, he had claimed, a particular degradation of death itself, a perpetration of our humanity bound in some way to affect our perception of reason itself. The contradictions regarding Auschwitz that Agamben senses to be latent within Adorno’s remarks involve the intuition ‘on the one hand, of having realized the unconditional triumph of death against life; on the other, of having degraded and debased death. Neither of these charges – perhaps like every charge, which is always a genuinely legal gesture – succeed in exhausting Auschwitz’s offense, in defining its case in point’ (RA 81). And this is the stance that Agamben wishes to hammer home quite emphatically vis-à-vis Adorno’s limitations, ones that, I would only add, seem to linger within Agamben’s own formulations in ways that he has still not come to reckon with entirely: ‘This oscillation’, he affirms, ‘betrays reason’s incapacity to identify the specific crime of Auschwitz with certainty’ (RA 81).

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

Policy analysis and complexity – a non-equilibrium approach for integrated water management

1995 ◽  
Vol 31 (8) ◽  
pp. 301-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Govert D. Geldof
Keyword(s):  
Water Management ◽  
Control System ◽  
Planning Process ◽  
The Other ◽  
Integrated Water Management ◽  
Equilibrium Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Groundwater Policy ◽  
Non Equilibrium

In integrated water management, the issues are often complex by nature, they are capable of subjective interpretation, are difficult to express in standards and exhibit many uncertainties. For such issues, an equilibrium approach is not appropriate. A non-equilibrium approach has to be applied. This implies that the processes to which the integrated issue pertains, are regarded as “alive”’. Instead of applying a control system as the model for tackling the issue, a network is used as the model. In this network, several “agents”’ are involved in the modification, revision and rearrangement of structures. It is therefore an on-going renewal process (perpetual novelty). In the planning process for the development of a groundwater policy for the municipality of Amsterdam, a non-equilibrium approach was adopted. In order to do justice to the integrated character of groundwater management, an approach was taken, containing the following features: (1) working from global to detailed, (2) taking account of the history of the system, (3) giving attention to communication, (4) building flexibility into the establishing of standards, and (5) combining reason and emotions. A middle course was sought, between static, rigid but reliable on the one hand; dynamic, flexible but vague on the other hand.

On the nature of chemistry

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric R. Scerri
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Recent History ◽  
History Of Chemistry ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Fundamental Unity ◽  
The 19Th Century

<span>The very nature of chemistry presents us with a tension. A tension between the exhilaration of diversity of substances and forms on the one hand and the safety of fundamental unity on the other. Even just the recent history of chemistry has been al1 about this tension, from the debates about Prout's hypothesis as to whether there is a primary matter in the 19th century to the more recent speculations as to whether computers will enable us to virtually dispense with experimental chemistry.</span>

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anh Q. Tran
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Pragmatic Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Vietnamese Studies

The Introduction gives the background of the significance of translating and study of the text Errors of the Three Religions. The history of the development of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism in Vietnam from their beginning until the eighteenth century is narrated. Particular attention is given to the different manners in which the Three Religions were taken up by nobles and literati, on the one hand, and commoners, on the other. The chapter also presents the pragmatic approach to religion taken by the Vietnamese, which was in part responsible for the receptivity of the Vietnamese to Christianity. The significance of the discovery of Errors and its impact on Vietnamese studies are also discussed.

Multicultural and Transnational Novels

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Meffan
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
The Other ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Return Home ◽  
Access Rights ◽  
The One

This chapter discusses the history of multicultural and transnational novels in New Zealand. A novel set in New Zealand will have to deal with questions about cultural access rights on the one hand and cultural coverage on the other. The term ‘transnational novel’ gains its relevance from questions about cultural and national identity, questions that have particularly exercised nations formed from colonial history. The chapter considers novels that demonstrate and respond to perceived deficiencies in wider discourses of cultural and national identity by way of comparison between New Zealand and somewhere else. These include Amelia Batistich's Another Mountain, Another Song (1981), Albert Wendt's Sons for the Return Home (1973) and Black Rainbow (1992), James McNeish's Penelope's Island (1990), Stephanie Johnson's The Heart's Wild Surf (2003), and Lloyd Jones's Mister Pip (2006).

scholarly journals Cultural History, Ritual and Performance: George L. Mosse in Context

2021 ◽  
pp. 002200942094003
Author(s):  
Peter Burke
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Performance Studies ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Cultural Turn

George L. Mosse took a ‘cultural turn’ in the latter part of his career, but still early enough to make a pioneering contribution to the study of political culture and in particular what he called political ‘liturgy’, including marches, processions, and practices of commemoration. He adapted to the study of nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the approach to the history of ritual developed by historians of medieval and early modern Europe, among them his friend Ernst Kantorowicz. More recently, the concept of ritual, whether religious or secular, has been criticized by some cultural historians on the grounds that it implies a fixed ‘script’ in situations that were actually marked by fluidity and improvisation. In this respect cultural historians have been part of a wider trend that includes sociologists and anthropologists as well as theatre scholars and has been institutionalized as Performance Studies. Some recent studies of contemporary nationalism in Tanzania, Venezuela and elsewhere have adopted this perspective, emphasizing that the same performance may have different meanings for different sections of the audience. It is only to be regretted that Mosse did not live long enough to respond to these studies and that their authors seem unaware of his work.

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